At 18, Courtney Bender was lucky to be alive.

On a May morning, she woke up with a terrible headache and then, suddenly, was no longer able to breathe. An aneurysm had ruptured in her brain stem, destroying a third of the right side of her brain.

After a life-saving surgery, a doctor, taking stock of her partial paralysis, her new memory struggles, her vision impairment and her slurred speech, told the family Bender would never recover.

Read full article with quote from BAF here.